I'm not bagging on Chinese manufacturing in general, they build the worlds stuff, including super high quality+value items. Yet throwaway brands peddling junk that wouldn't have realistically made it onto the shelves of a big box store is a real problem on Amazon's marketplace, and other similar ones.
Is Amazon forcing shit-hunters to buy Chinese shit for cheap? You get what you pay. There are expensive high quality Chinese products whiners can't afford.
That's not the Chinese products though, that's Amazon natively supporting the faulty knock-off market. Every country has rort factories, if you look hard enough. And Amazon's binning system is perfectly designed to platform them to captive audiences.
Oh, I agree - I don't think Chinese companies make cheap crappy things because they can't make good things. There are clearly many world-class Chinese companies (DJI springs to mind, their stuff is unmatched.)
From what I can see, the issue seems to be lack of trust between companies. If you never know whether you're going to get what you paid for, then the only way to distinguish between suppliers is price and it becomes a race to the bottom.
This lines up with the fact that most high end Chinese companies seem to be vertically integrated monoliths, which own the entire supply chain and so can control quality.
It's not that China universally produces garbage. It's that they can get away with producing garbage and even straight up knockoffs. Additionally they already have the equipment there to manufacture this stuff. That leads to most of those terrible items coming from Chinese companies. That's why Chinese, cheap garbage, and false marketing are associated with China. If they don't want that to be the case, someone would need to crack down on the lies and knockoffs.
I've been quite (pleasantly) surprised at the quality of electronic components/tools I've ordered off of Aliexpress/eBay. And yeah the leading indicator seems to be how consumer-focused the item is - A while back I did a test with 4 random 5V1A phone chargers, figuring one or two would be shoddy. The best of the lot could put out 600mA - I didn't even bother opening them up for visual inspection.
I attribute the popular refrain of "Chinese crap" to general simplemindedness bemoaning the state of the world. Your average person is not likely to focus on where a product is made when it works. Since everything is made in China, broken->"Made in China" is the association that gets made.
It's not like people aren't aware that it's the Western companies cheapening things, but they won't stop supporting them and the general unifying factor is still "China". Take something like Harbor Fright - it's clear that everything the store sells is "Chinese crap", yet they're still patronized by the people complaining the hardest. I think people just like to complain rather than act.
Right - if you are already having a product made in China, you are the middle man. If you are actually making the product yourself, then Amazon might come to you and create an off-brand version with some trivial differences. But, in any case the designs of simple products are not nearly as sacred as the actual manufacture of them.
Unfortunately, it does have a depressing effect on new design and innovation. And it certainly seems that the low-cost Chinese manufacturers haven't got the knack for originality yet.
Compared to how many Japanese manufacturers pleasantly surprised American companies with their quality, strong business ethics, and emphasis on long term relationships, the constant stream of surprisingly slimy practices of Chinese manufacturers is a stark contrast.
>'ve only bought a few things from Alibaba over the years, but most of them have turned out to be either faulty or a typical case of 'chinese manufacturer disappointment' which has led me to being reluctant to buy anything larger/more expensive. When I was in Marrakech a couple of years ago, the guy who owned the riad we stayed in referred to many things in the souks as being "China quality", and I guess that's the problem.
Which doesn't mean much ("China quality" that is) since iPhones are also made in China -- as are expensive clothes for the likes of Armani and co and tons of other high-end stuff. And of course lots of Chinese designed and made products that are of high quality.
Of course tons of cheap stuff is made there too -- almost all the world's manufacturing of cheapo stuff. Heck, almost anything you can get on a place like Walmart is probably made in China too, but sold for 2-5 times as much as in Chinese sites.
If someone buys some $80 "laptop" off of Alibaba, or some "leather jacket" for $30, or some no-brand el-cheapo "camera drone", of course they're gonna get subpar quality. If an offer looks too good to be true, it probably ain't, and if there are no reviews (on third party sites) or nobody knows the brand name, well, those things don't point to getting a good buying experience.
Theres a whole burgeoning trend of chinese manufacturers buying the licensing rights to defunct brands and putting the eerily branded goods up on amazon.
This. There are different levels of Chinese manufacturing. One made for top Europe and American brands that are good quality while others is the utter junk that floods the Asia Pacific.
I'm always amazed by the way people think of things manufactured in China, especially people who still consider it to mean cheap and inferior. It's true China makes a lot of poor quality crap cheap, but they also make really high quality products if you're willing to pay for it instead of going to the cheapest bid.
> I've never heard of this myth about Chinese products;
It's not a widely held belief, but there certainly are people out there that believe the myth that China doesn't want a bad reputation for making products, so China will go the extra mile to prove people wrong about their 'shoddy' image and deliver excellent well-made products. Maybe in most cases they do have good craftmanship, but as I said; from my experience I have seen nothing but trouble from Chinese products, especially from Amazon.
I too go to great lengths to avoid purchasing Chinese made products. It seems that manufacturers and sellers are now trying to hide country of origin labeling, which is absolutely infuriating.
China produces some excellent quality, and a vast amount of awful quality as for the last couple of decades that has been their selling point.
It's not so long ago that it was Japan that produced mostly crap and made lots of inferior copies of western goods. They moved past it, and now are often superior, as will China.
I see it not as China bashing more brand bashing. There's an expectation of quality from some of the old names that built reputation making a particular product. In the main, quality manufacturers that have moved production elsewhere have lost a lot of that quality - wherever they moved it to. Just the same happens when brands become just a word in someone's brand portfolio after they've been bought up a time or two.
e.g. Fiskars are huge and spent the 2000's buying up dozens of famous international luxury brands, closing their factories, and selling much inferior, made elsewhere, products on those brand names.
Perhaps the problem is not China in particular, but the substitution of trusting brands for trusting reviews. Great Chinese brands exist, like Anker, but people still seem to go straight for that 5-star (probably fake) lorem-ipsum-esque brand at half the price.
The unreliableness of Chinese-made goods is usually due to incompetent Western firms cost-cutting and communication errors arising from cross-globe, cross-language collaborations. It's unfortunate nobody blames the CEOs for made-in-China, just the Chinese people for making it.
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